By Choe Sang-Hun
Ganghwa, South Korea: For seven years, Kim Seongmin has been facing cancer that has spread to his lungs, brain and liver. Doctors recently gave him only months to live. He can’t sleep at night without painkillers.
Still, Kim broadcasts into North Korea twice a day, bringing its people news and information they are cut off from because of strict censorship laws.
Kim Seongmin, president of Free North Korea Radio, edits content for the station at his home on Ganghwa Island.Credit: New York Times
“North Korea is keeping its people like frogs trapped in a deep well,” said Kim, 62, during an interview at his rural home on this island west of Seoul, where he records and edits shows for Free North Korea Radio. “We broadcast to help them realise that there is something wrong with their political system.”
For two decades, North Korean defectors living in South Korea have been infiltrating the North with outside news and entertainment through balloons floated across the border or broadcasts such as those from Kim’s radio station.
But Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, has grown increasingly sensitive to “anti-socialist and non-socialist” influences that could threaten his totalitarian grip on power, and he is cracking down on such efforts like never before.
Authorities are searching homes and pedestrians, meting out harsh punishments, including public executions, to people who consume news and TV dramas from South Korea, or even if they sing, speak, dress and text-message like South Koreans, according to North Korean documents and a South Korean government report.
Bottles filled with rice and packages, each containing propaganda posters, a US dollar bill and a Bible, which Kim Seongmin’s group plans to send to North Korea.Credit: New York Times
North Korea has been flexing its military muscle beyond the Korean Peninsula by sending troops and weapons to Russia to support its war against Ukraine. But at home, Kim Jong-un is reinforcing the country’s defences against foreign influences.
He has built more walls along North Korea’s border with China, giving soldiers there a shoot-to-kill order to stop an outflow of refugees and an influx of people smuggling outside goods and information. He destroyed his country’s few roads and railways linking to South Korea after declaring that the North was no longer interested in reunification with the South. And he has introduced a slate of draconian new censorship laws.
“We sense the fears of the Kim Jong-un regime,” Admiral Kim Myung-soo, chair of South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, told parliament recently.
This year, the North called foreign content being sent across from the South “filth” and retaliated by sending balloons filled with rubbish and broadcasting eerie noises across the border.
Defectors prepare to release balloons carrying leaflets and a banner denouncing Kim Jong-un in 2016. Campaigns like these enrage the Kim regime.Credit: AP
Kim, the founder of Free North Korea Radio, was a captain and propaganda writer at a North Korean artillery unit when he fled to China in 1995. He wanted to defect to South Korea but was arrested at a Chinese port. He said he was on his way to Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, for certain execution when he jumped through the window of a train toilet booth while an armed guard waited outside. He fled back to China and arrived in Seoul in 1999. He launched Free North Korea Radio in 2004.
“He was a pioneer, the first North Korean defector to start a radio broadcast into the North,” said Lee Min-bok, a fellow defector who began sending leaflet-filled balloons to the North around the time Kim started his radio broadcasts. “He spoke more closely to the North Korean heart because he broadcast in North Korean dialects.”
During recent broadcasts, Kim’s station reported international criticism of the North’s troop dispatch to Russia and invited North Korean female veterans to testify to any sexual violence they had endured in the North Korean People’s Army. It carried letters from Japanese people whose family members had been kidnapped to the North. North Korean defectors living in the South reported there was hot water in every South Korean home, while ordinary North Koreans had to take cold showers, even in the winter.
Lee Si-young, director of Free North Korea Radio, at the Seoul recording studio where its content is recorded daily.Credit: New York Times
Kim often gets information from informers inside the North who use mobile phones with prepaid Chinese SIM cards. With those phones, they can pick up Chinese signals from near the border and exchange calls, text messages and photos with Kim.
With their help, he reported the execution of Jang Song-thaek, Kim Jong-un’s uncle, in 2013, days before the North’s state media announced it.
Through his sources, Kim also monitored young North Koreans who grew up in the wake of a famine in the 1990s and have depended more on unofficial markets than on state rations to feed themselves. They trust their government less than the generations before them did and have an insatiable appetite for foreign entertainment and news, which they obtained through CDs, DVDs and computer memory sticks smuggled from China, as well as through balloons carrying USB drives and broadcasts such as Kim’s.
Kim can’t tell how many North Koreans listen to his shortwave broadcasts, which are financed by US and South Korean human rights and religious groups. In the North, all radio and TV sets have their channels fixed to receive only government broadcasts, although defectors say people often manipulate their devices to receive South Korean broadcasts.
Free North Korea Radio and other sources of outside news – such as Radio Free Asia, funded by the US Congress, and North Korea Reform Radio, which is run by another group of defectors – seek to chip away at the information blackout.
The office of Free North Korea Radio in Seoul, South Korea. Credit: New York Times
Efforts to exert influence from abroad have increasingly drawn Kim Jong-un’s ire as he seeks to control the country’s younger generations, according to internal North Korean government documents Kim received from his informers.
“Anti-socialist and non-socialist practices” have become a malicious tumour that “penetrated deep into social life in general”, putting North Korea’s socialist system at a crossroads, said one of the North Korean documents that Kim shared with The New York Times. In an unnamed provincial city, 9000 high school students surrendered themselves for watching “impure” videos after authorities promised not to punish them.
Under laws introduced recently by Kim Jong-un, those who watch, possess or distribute South Korean content face a punishment of five to 10 years in labour camps, according to the South’s National Intelligence Service.
Even those who “speak, write or sing” in a South Korean style or publish texts using South Korean fonts face up to two years of hard labour.
Those who distribute them widely face the death penalty. A 22-year-old farmworker was killed by firing squad in 2022 for possessing 70 songs and three movies from South Korea and sharing them with seven other people, according to a human rights report from South Korea’s Unification Ministry.
Last year, North Korea called for “random inspections” of electronic devices to ferret out those who consume South Korean videos and broadcasts.
The crackdown has created a chilling effect, leading to an estimated 70 per cent fall in outside information reaching North Koreans, said Kang Shin-sam, head of the Seoul-based human rights group Unification Academy, during a recent forum. But some North Koreans find new ways to circumvent censorship, other analysts say.
Kim Seongmin worked at a studio in Seoul with a staff of five other North Korean defectors until he moved months ago to his island house. Two police officers are assigned to guard him against possible terrorist attacks from North Korea.
Over the years, he has received numerous threats from South Koreans who accused him of raising tensions with the North, as well as anonymous packages that contained dead mice or dolls smeared with red paint and with knives stuck in their chest. A North Korean secret police officer he had known in the North once called him from China, threatening to harm his sisters in the North, Kim said. But he persisted. In July, the South Korean government awarded him a citizen’s medal for his work.
Lee Si-young, another defector who joined the station’s staff eight years ago, said she listened to Free North Korea Radio while in the North.
“For North Koreans, our radio signals are like a lighthouse in the darkness, bringing hope that a better day will come,” she said.
Kim said he would die knowing that the work he started would be continued by younger defectors he trained.
“I will die a happy man,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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